


There's a bright light in the north wind, gonna bring you home

by dozmuffinxc



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Drug Use, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-13
Updated: 2014-06-13
Packaged: 2018-02-04 11:15:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1777096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dozmuffinxc/pseuds/dozmuffinxc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“All his life, Sherlock has been floating.” A character study of Sherlock Holmes, his history of drug use, and what happens when his anchor, John Watson, is removed from his life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	There's a bright light in the north wind, gonna bring you home

**Author's Note:**

  * For [camerabag](https://archiveofourown.org/users/camerabag/gifts).



> Written for camerabag, my fellow “Sherlockian Ace,” and inspired by Laura Nyro’s song “Been On a Train.”

All his life, Sherlock Holmes has been floating. 

He isn’t usually one for metaphor, but when he fumbles around through the closets of his mind palace for an equivalent feeling, the sensation of floating is the only one he manages to unearth that comes close.

Once, when he was four years old, Mummy had taken him and Mycroft to the shore for the afternoon. Sherlock had never seen the ocean, and he was eager to absorb the new details. Even as a child, he was already classifying the decibels of a seagull’s screech, attempting to calculate the arc of the waves before they crashed into the sand. Mummy had put Mycroft in charge, and while she pored over the latest edition of a mathematics journal and Mycroft brooded in the shade of their umbrella, Sherlock had tottered down the beach towards the siren call of the water.

He remembers colors: roiling grey foaming about the edges with confectionery white; blinding turquoise flashes among the darker streaks of hard, cobalt blue. The closer he got, the more colors he could discern until the colors were no longer in front of him: they _were_ him, and for one glorious moment he was in the midst of a symphony of hues. He didn’t see the wave coming until it had crashed over his head and dragged him below the bright surface of the water to the dark, crushing rip current.

Suspended in a darkness that seemed to go on forever, Sherlock felt for the first time the sensation of being completely weightless and at the mercy of forces that defied the laws of gravity. Fear forgotten, his child’s mind processed the peculiar feeling of being tethered to nothing and everything at the same time and wondered how far he might float away before someone realized he was gone. 

He doesn’t remember how it happened. _That’s right, my clever boy,_ Mummy had said as she sobbed into his sopping curls when the water deposited him on the shore, _never fight the tide._ He remembers the satisfaction of seeing Mycroft soundly chastised for leaving his young brother to drown, but he remembers even more clearly the unnerving transition from water to land. To go from weightless abandon to hard, demanding reality had been jarring, but the relief of it had caused him to cling to his mother for the rest of the day in a way he had never done before. That night when he fell asleep, clutching the stuffed otter that had been his birthday present from Father, he felt his bed dematerialize around him and replace itself with the free-falling, empty sensation of the sea.

There was peace in that feeling, and terror, too. It’s a sensation that Sherlock has felt many times in the years that followed. 

As an adult, floating had become his _modus operandi._ There was no anchor for a man like him in this world – not for him the clutching connection of lovers or the clinging, codependent buoyancy of friendship. As a boy, he had been rejected by his classmates and as an adult he had alienated himself further with his sharp comments and his obvious superiority. Before he found The Work, Sherlock had let himself drift untethered towards whatever peace could be afforded him by drugs, and he learned to let himself embrace the lonely nothingness that cocaine in his veins summoned up. The emptiness was familiar, and he retreated so far into it that it had taken Mycroft calling in a favor with an old acquaintance at Scotland Yard to have him picked up and shipped off to a discreet rehab center in the country to wrench him, screaming, back out again.

And then there was John. If ever an anchor had existed in this life, it was in the person of John Hamish Watson. At first, Sherlock had been at a loss to divine the pull that John exerted on him, for theirs was an unlikely partnership. He had seen the disbelief in Sally Donovan’s eyes when he had arrived at the crime scene on that first night with John in tow. _He looks so normal_ – her eyes practically screamed it as she gave his companion a thorough once over. Even then, even on that first night, Sherlock had known that she was wrong: John Watson was far from “normal.”

Over the years of their association, John had become more than just a helpmeet. At first, Sherlock had simply found pleasure in the praise that John had been so free to bestow. The Work became more than a chore, an obsession necessary to keep his brain from falling into disrepair; in the weeks that followed that first meeting, there was a pleasure to each case that kept him running from one crime scene to the next and it thrilled him to know that John was only a few steps behind.

It took the better part of a year for Sherlock to realize that John had become more than an assistant. Although the praise remained, John was quicker to question Sherlock when even Lestrade and his self-important lackeys remained silent. He became a moral compass before Sherlock knew he needed such a thing, and subtly, day by day, Sherlock found himself altering. Emotional connections came easier; moments of sentiment flared when he least expected them; the world took on a different slant of light, and Sherlock found that he liked it.

John may have been oblivious to the reason for these changes, but Moriarty certainly had not. He chose his victims well, the snipers set to strike where the blow would fall hardest, and the fall from St. Bart’s had been both inevitable and comforting. To die for John Watson was a sacrifice that Sherlock had been prepared to make since the evening at the pool, and it was only logical that he would have to pay eventually for the consolation of John’s friendship.

But he hadn’t really died, of course. He and Mycroft had planned for every eventuality. What he hadn’t been prepared for was the shock of abandonment he felt when he had boarded the plane at the private hangar in Heathrow at midnight and John Watson wasn’t there at his side. Selfishly, he failed to think about how it was really John who was being abandoned. John was a horrible liar; he could never keep the secret of Sherlock’s deception, and if the deception failed, John Watson would die.

For two years, Sherlock threw himself into The Work, only this time, it was different. The pleasure and the passion were gone; the cases he took abroad, the investigations he corrected in foreign lands, were merely methods of distraction. He wanted no credit for his successes because there was no meaning in them. He ran from one country to the next with wild abandon, going for weeks at a time without checking in with Mycroft until finally he found himself chained up in the basement of a Russian terrorist organization and there was his brother, come at last to spirit him home.

Yet again, he was caught unawares. He had expected a happy reunion with his devoted blogger; instead, he found a man full of rage and unforgiving accusations, a man on the brink of marriage who was almost ripped from Sherlock’s life again when fire had threatened to extinguish John Watson’s light forever. John finally forgave him, but their relationship had been irrevocably altered by his new life with Mary – Mary, who Sherlock couldn’t hate because maybe John needed an anchor, too, and Sherlock had failed him when he had needed him most.

It was pathetic, really. Love is a chemical defect and Sherlock shuns anything that doesn’t contribute to The Work, but when John asked Sherlock to be his best man, Sherlock realized that there was nothing in the world he would rather be. Just as Sherlock began to accept that he might actually love John Watson, John was devoting himself to another, and the wedding that had brought so much joy to so many of the people closest to him tore a hole through his circumscribed heart.

John Watson was Sherlock’s lodestone. The magnetism of the steadfast doctor had held Sherlock to the world, connected him with everything it meant to be whole and human, and when that anchor was taken away, Sherlock found himself floating once again. It was a familiar feeling, and it wasted no time in consuming him once more as it had done when he had left university and truly floundered for the first time. Without John’s compass guiding his path, Sherlock loosed himself into the abyss and drifted on the narcotic wings of his old habit.

It isn’t so bad, this floating. With nothing to buoy him up, Sherlock is content to wait for the inevitable sinking that will drown him for good or for the north wind that will bring him home.


End file.
